A group of marchers walking more than 700 kilometres across Quebec to protest pipelines that would carry Alberta's tar sands through the province are nearing their final destination.

As pipelines in British Columbia and the United States have been delayed by opposition, oil companies have increasingly turned their hopes to two eastward-looking pipeline projects – TransCanada's Energy East and Enbridge's Line 9 – that would pass oil through Quebec before exporting it abroad.

A new video vividly shows the concerns of farmers, land-owners, indigenous peoples and citizens the walkers have encountered along their route, the makings of a loose coalition mounting a growing protest.

People like Claudie Gagné, who for 15 years has operated a business in the province's east, harvesting plants from along the St. Lawrence river – Quebec's most important watershed – to enrich the dishes of restaurants in the region.

"I work with the river, I harvest plants from the shore," Gagné says. "I create jobs with this enterprise, employing people in the region. So I’m scared that my livelihood is in danger. And for what? For jobs that will only last two years, and which will create nothing in the coming thirty years, while putting in peril the nature that I work with."

Oil company promises that the pipeline projects will bring thousands of jobs and a boost to the Quebec economy, a new report indicates, are grossly overstated. And where the industry may create a dozen jobs here, a dozen there, they may end up jeopardizing thousands with a spill.

Gagné's story contrasts with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's claim, repeated this week, that it would be a "job-killer" to address climate change by reigning in oil companies. "No country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth," he said.

Presenting climate action as an irresponsible scheme to block badly-needed jobs in a time of economic crisis has proved to be a reliable script. This story has pitted the needs of the economy against the environment, of workers against ecologists, of communities against the planet.

But the truth is we can have both a strong, vibrant economy and a healthy, clean environment – though not by building pipelines. The faces encountered along the march – Gagné and her regenerative, river-based enterprise, the young people returning to the land to farm organically, a mechanic casting about for a new way of life, indigenous peoples seeking to apply their ancestral wisdom – all gesture toward a new economic paradigm that is tune with the environment.

The new paradigm would involve a transition to local, living economies, decentralized and with democratic control over resources, which could provide hundreds of thousands of good-paying, dignified and ecologically-viable jobs that transform our relationship to the environment and each other.

This vision of the walkers is backed up by evidence: report after report showing that investment in green industry creates far more jobs than investment in pipelines. One study demonstrates that spending $5 billion not on the oil and gas industry but on renewable power, housing retrofits, clean transport and recycling would create anywhere from 3 to 34 times as many direct jobs.

As the marchers have passed through Quebec, they have been joined by indigenous walkers, been welcomed in indigenous communities, and been inspired by an indigenous prophecy that a "black snake" of pipelines, like highways and railways before it, must be defended against.

"I feel like we can repel this snake that is coming to break the land, that is coming to pollute the air and contaminate our water," Innu poet and walker Natasha Kanapé Fontaine says. "But I don't know how we are going to save this land, if we continue to maintain our differences and conflicts and do not unite."

In this province, that will require a reckoning with a form of oppression older even than the domination of Quebecers by english Canada: the domination of indigenous peoples by french Quebec. The dawning recognition of the importance of indigenous perspectives and rights – a powerful catalyst for a new economy – is a welcome change.

The pipeline snake, as a social movement from coast to coast has encircled it, has found itself increasingly caught in its pit. "Right now our oil is effectively landlocked," Canada's Finance Minister Joe Oliver complained on Monday, acknowledging the power of the growing climate justice movement. "Canadians need to understand the consequences of not moving our resources to tidewater."

Canadians increasingly do, in fact, though not in the way the Minister would hope: they understand that the effort to keep dirty oil in the ground is helping unleash the imagination for a different kind of economy, one that works for people and the earth itself.